September Attendance Awareness Month – Part 3How after-school programs can reinforce good attendance

PostSeptember 25, 2015

Afterschool programs can play a vital role by partnering with schools to reinforce good attendance habits. Not only can afterschool programs help with improving a student’s overall academic performance, research shows they can help a student’s attendance record by:

Providing socialization and peer attention in a supervised setting

Re-establishing the link between effort and results – first in a non-school activity

Engaging students in challenging activities that help them develop persistence, a trait critical to later success in school and life

Providing consistent contact with caring, stable adults

Increasing the sense of belonging at school

Here are 6 ideas to prioritize good attendance in your afterschool program:

Make good attendance – in the program and in school – a featured goal of the program

Talk with parents about the importance of attendance: if their children aren’t in school, they won’t be able to keep up and advance

Suggest and support ways to help parents, families, and students help each other, such as phone trees, buddy systems, pick-up and drop-off backups, transportation pools, transportation discounts, and others

Get school attendance date for your program participants

Find out if any of the children in your program are chronically absent from school

Support school outreach, ad efforts to identify and overcome barriers to good attendance

Find out if your afterschool program is doing all it can to make attendance a priority. Click on the link below to download a free evaluation tool to assess ways to improve tracking attendance.